Spatial Planning for Regions in Growing Economies (SPRING)

SPRING combines intensive training in development theories and strategies, planning concepts and methods, and implementation and monitoring tools with practice-oriented field studies aimed at elaborating regional development plans and programmes in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The programme focuses on the specific cultural and socio-economic contexts in the developing world. SPRING places its emphasis on development management at the level between macro-regional and community-based planning. Development planning is seen as a problem-oriented management tool with the following objectives: to identify development problems, trends, resources, constraints and potentials to formulate development objectives, policies and strategies to design plans and programmes to assess environmental impacts of plans and programmes to organise target group participation and decision making processes to apply instruments for programme implementation and management to evaluate and monitor plans and programmes